Most influential books

I was reading Jim's and Matt's blogs, where they list the ten political books which have had the most influence on them. I'm fairly widely read politically, and yet this spurred me to wonder whether books have influenced my political direction, or if they've merely illuminated a direction I was already travelling.

Whereas books might give people the arguments and illustrations to help them to sharpen their opinions and better advocate them to others, I'm skeptical of how much they influence our actual direction in life.

My guess is that our political outlook is determined much more by psychological factors, and by the social and economic circumstances we find ourselves in. We gravitate towards advocating either individualist or collectivist solutions to problems, and to implementing these solutions in either a liberal or repressive manner. Beyond this, political theory merely turns us into the little-enders or big-enders of Liliput.

There are science books that change the world though - either new calculations which bring on huge technological change (Newton), or new theories which completely demolish fanciful religious stories (Darwin). There are also books which have far-reaching impacts on people's ethics and behaviour (The New Testament).

According to Martin Seymour-Smith, these are the 100 most influential books in history (in chronological order). Those I've read are in bold, and also brief comments on them:

1. The I Ching - a good way for lost souls to waste time, tossing coins to determine their actions, and ignoring any results they don't like.
   
2. The Old Testament - a brutal account of the psychotic actions of a jealous god. This book helped me to realise that christianity wasn't for me.
   
3. The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer - I'm sure these were much more snappy when told as part of an oral tradition - but still an essential source of western mythology and imagination.
   
4. The Upanishads - I remember reading this when I had my "interest in different religions" phase. Perhaps tellingly, I don't remember much of the contents.
   
5. Tao te Ching, Lao-tzu - A classic of Eastern Philosophy. It has to be said, though, it's a bit of a philosophy for the unambitious - e.g. "Should a man grow old and die without ever leaving his village, let him feel as though there was nothing he ever missed"
   
6. The Avesta
   
7. Analects, Confucius
8. History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides - one of my favourite books of all time. I expected it to be so dry and dusty that it would give me a permanent sore throat. But it's GREAT. It's a rip roaring account of decades of war and strife, covering military strategies, diplomacy, political debate, and sociological impacts of the war. Forget current affairs and immerse yourself in this for a couple of weeeks - you won't regret it.
   
9. Works, Hippocrates
10. Works, Aristotle
11. History, Herodotus
12. The Republic, Plato - I recommend this not so much for the philosophy, although it's a good philosophical text, but because it shows us that humans really haven't changed at all in our thought processes and motivations in 2000+ years.
    
13. Elements, Euclid
14. The Dhammapada
15. Aeneid, Virgil
16. On the Nature of Reality, Lucretius
17. Allegorical Expositions of the Holy Laws, Philo of Alexandria
18. The New Testament - a definite improvement on the old testament. Not a bad text for the common folk to live their lives by.
    
19. Lives, Plutarch
20. Annals, from the Death of the Divine Augustus, Cornelius Tacitus
21. The Gospel of Truth
22. Meditations, Marcus Aurelius - one of the very few books which has changed the way I think and act in my life. Stoicism is definitely the philosophy for me. It's made me a saner, more balanced person.
    
23. Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Sextus Empiricus
24. Enneads, Plotinus
25. Confessions, Augustine of Hippo - not the raunchy page-turner I was hoping for.
    
26. The Koran - read bits of it - cf my thoughts on the old testament.
    
27. Guide for the Perplexed, Moses Maimonides
28. The Kabbalah - mystical mumbo jumbo, superseded by science.
    
29. Summa Theologicae, Thomas Aquinas
30. The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri - hard going, but some cool imagery
    
31. In Praise of Folly, Desiderius Erasmus
32. The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli - seems jolly and elementary in these cynical days.
    
33. On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Martin Luther
34. Gargantua and Pantagruel, François Rabelais
35. Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin
36. On the Revolution of the Celestial Orbs, Nicolaus Copernicus - read this for my degree. It would probably have seemed more mind-blowing if I actually lived in the Sixteenth Century.
    
37. Essays, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
38. Don Quixote, Parts I and II, Miguel de Cervantes - a little heavy going, but still a reasonable read. I wouldn't necessarily recommend reading it though - as long as you know the basics of it, you can bluff your way through a conversation about it.
    
39. The Harmony of the World, Johannes Kepler
40. Novum Organum, Francis Bacon
41. The First Folio [Works], William Shakespeare - I recognise the value of Shakespeare but, controversially, I don't enjoy watching his plays. Call me a philistine, but I enjoy a play much more if I can actually understand what they're saying.
    
42. Dialogue Concerning Two New Chief World Systems, Galileo Galilei
43. Discourse on Method, René Descartes - an important book in the history of scientific thought, but not one I necessarily enjoyed reading
    
44. Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes
45. Works, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
46. Pensées, Blaise Pascal
47. Ethics, Baruch de Spinoza
48. Pilgrim's Progress, John Bunyan
49. Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, Isaac Newton - I once picked up part of the Principia, but quickly put it down again.
    
50. Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke
51. The Principles of Human Knowledge, George Berkeley - Bishop Berkeley's treatise is one of those philosophical books, of which the experience of reading it is akin to an acid trip. "Wow, so like everything is just like ideas in the mind of god, and there's no real matter. Far out man!!"
    
52. The New Science, Giambattista Vico
53. A Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume
54. The Encyclopedia, Denis Diderot, ed.
55. A Dictionary of the English Language, Samuel Johnson
56. Candide, François-Marie de Voltaire
57. Common Sense, Thomas Paine
58. An Enquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith
59. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon
60. Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant - the best and clearest book of philosophy I've ever read. Kant is pretty much unassailable. All subsequent generations of budding philosophers must have read this downcast thinking, "Shit, I'll never write anything to top this".
    
61. Confessions, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
62. Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke
63. Vindication of the Rights of Women, Mary Wollstonecraft
64. An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, William Godwin
65. An Essay on the Principle of Population, Thomas Robert Malthus - Malthusianism will always be with us. There's always evidence to support apocalypticists who say we're on the brink of an over-population catastrophe, but they've always been proved wrong in the past. One day they might be vindicated. Even a blind darts player hits the bullseye occasionally.
    
66. Phenomenology of Spirit, George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
67. The World as Will and Idea, Arthur Schopenhauer
68. Course in the Positivist Philosophy, Auguste Comte
69. On War, Carl Marie von Clausewitz
70. Either/Or, Søren Kierkegaard
71. The Manifesto of the Communist Party, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels - The original rabble-rouser. A strange treatise though. Much of it reads as a real paean to the dynamism of the Bourgeoisie, rather than a condemnation. Still relevant for Marxists tofay.
    
72. "Civil Disobedience," Henry David Thoreau - A brilliantly written call to act in line with your conscience
    
73. The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, Charles Darwin - I've read parts of it. As Dawkins keeps saying, it's one of the most beautiful and elegant scientific theories ever conceived. It greatly angers and frustrates me that, 150 years later, there are still millions of otherwise decent people who consider it the work of the devil.
    
74. On Liberty, John Stuart Mill
75. First Principles, Herbert Spencer
76. "Experiments with Plant Hybrids," Gregor Mendel
77. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
78. Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, James Clerk Maxwell
79. Thus Spake Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche
80. The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud
81. Pragmatism, William James
82. Relativity, Albert Einstein
83. The Mind and Society, Vilfredo Pareto
84. Psychological Types, Carl Gustav Jung - not so much this book but the theory of psychological types has been quite important to me. When I read a detailed description of an INTP, it was like looking in the mirror. I don't meet many people like me, and this made me feel less alone in the world.
    
85. I and Thou, Martin Buber
86. The Trial, Franz Kafka - how I feel whenever I have to deal with a government service or automated phone system
    
87. The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Karl Popper - being born in 1981, it's not easy to appreciate how important some of these books were when they were written. We're lucky to possess the legacy of science and philosophy - stil so much more to discover though.
    
88. The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, John Maynard Keynes
89. Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre
90. The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich von Hayek
91. The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
92. Cybernetics, Norbert Wiener
93. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell - This is a brilliant sci fi book. I really wish that it was classified as sci fi rather than as classic fiction - it would draw more people over to the sci fi shelves in the bookshop, and discover some of the other great works the genre has to offer.
    
94. Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff - I'd never heard of this book but, seeing its inclusion on this list, I'll try and seek it out
    
95. Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein
96. Syntactic Structures, Noam Chomsky
97. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, T. S. Kuhn - read this some years ago, and was very impressed by it. I don't know, but suspect I might be more critical of it today.
    
98. The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan
99. Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung [The Little Red Book], Mao Zedong
100. Beyond Freedom and Dignity, B. F. Skinner

Wow - I've read at least parts of 39 of these. I'm more well read than most people, but I still feel like I know so little, and that there is so much more to discover ... - and this list gives plenty of suggestions...

I doubt many of the latter fifty would appear on such a list in 200 years time though.

Breast Milk ice cream

PETA (whom I suspect love animals a bit too much, if you get what I mean), has called on Ben & Jerrys to replace cow milk with human breast milk in their ice cream.

I'm not sure they've thought this through. In order to do this on the globalised industrial scale required by Ben & Jerrys, we'd have to start treating lactating women like cattle.

Sure - who wouldn't like to suck on a breast milk ice lolly (or even breast milk cheese* or yoghurt). Waste not, want not - that's my attitude. But to make this happen, I'm not prepared to pay the price of keeping women in cattle sheds, waking them up at 5am to take them to the milking machines, and inducing pregnancies once a year to keep the breasts full of milk. We'd also have to selectively breed women with massive boobage. And my preference, to be frank, is something small, round and pert.

I'm sorry PETA - but not in my name, NOT IN MY NAME!!!


*When I was in Northern Spain, I came across a very interesting cheese called a Tetilla. However, despite its shape, it is disappointingly from sheep breast, rather than human breast. Food for thought, anyway...